The Disparity of Clarity

The flobble grindled in the dileptual thabberdings of slurg.

Don’t you just hate it when people don’t properly define stuff? How could you possibly understand what I’m talking about above when I haven’t defined words like ‘the’ and ‘in’ and ‘of’?

In my last piece I alluded to the nonsense we see all around us by quoting from the poem Jabberwocky; written by Lewis Carrol in 1871, or at least first published in its final form in his book Through the Looking-Glass.

Art and comedy are two areas where ambiguity and a certain degree of vagueness can be powerful. In art you might want someone to be drawn into an inner journey in which the resonances and subtleties you’ve built in are designed to lead to some Zen-like awakening.

The recent sculpture in honour of Martin Luther King is a good example of this

It takes me on an inner journey in which we embrace our digestive tracts and ends up somewhere near PornHub.

In comedy you often want to make direct use of ambiguities.

Yesterday a truck carrying Viagra was hijacked on the motorway. Police are warning the public to be on the look-out for a gang of hardened criminals

In the technical disciplines, like science and maths and engineering, definitions and clarity are critical. There’s an apocryphal story about a multi-national design team working on the construction of a satellite. One group worked in Imperial units for their little bit of the project and the rest worked in metric. The result was catastrophe. I doubt this story is actually true, but it’s a good parable anyway.

We do need this disparity of clarity. Both science and art are components that, I would argue, society can’t do without.

When I was doing my A-levels, back in the Cretaceous Period, I decided to take a couple of extra O-levels too¹. One was the delightfully titled English for Professional and Business Use which was a complete doddle and basically just a ‘free’ qualification. The other was called History and Appreciation of Music.

In this latter course we delved into the orchestration and musical techniques used in 4 famous classical pieces. It was fascinating and instructive to learn about the techniques these great composers had employed. It also completely ruined my enjoyment of these pieces, for a while. Instead of listening to the ‘music’, I listened for all the clever bits and pieces the composer had put in².

On the one hand it was useful to me as a (very amateur) pianist and songwriter, but the ‘clarity’ I gained was not always beneficial to me as a ‘consumer’. Sometimes you just want to be immersed in something without picking it apart. Maybe it was the ‘inner beauty’ of the duodenum that the sculptor was trying to convey in the MLK piece pictured above - but I’d rather stick to external beauty when doing the sexist man-stare thing.

For most things however, outside of the special requirements of things like art and science, we need a decent level of clarity.

I’m not seeing an awful lot of clarity about when it comes to far too many things that are important today.

Indeed, in some “disciplines” such as Queer Theory, striving for clarity is anathema, and it is a feature that things are confused and ill-defined and irrational. This is all part and parcel of the agenda to ‘queer’ society - to break down the formal understandings and strictures upon which we have traditionally operated.

Some loosening of those strictures might not be a bad thing - but wholesale chaos and confusion is not a good thing, either.

It’s the reason why the question What Is A Woman? is so bloody powerful. It goes beyond its specific application to highlight the mess that is gender ideology and highlights something very important about the state of things today.

Why can’t such a basic and important word be properly defined (by many)?

I’ve had this kind of problem ever since I had my awokening. When I first woke up to woke I had difficulty getting to grips with an explosion of terminology that was often ill-defined³.

Toxic masculinity and rape culture were two from the feminist pre-cursor of today’s woke wonderland. The biggest proponents of rape culture these days are the gender activists with their coercive attempts to convince homosexuals they are bigots for using genitals as a necessary⁴ condition for sexual attraction (necessary but not sufficient). It’s definitely a bit rapey via coercive guilt.

One of the most powerful techniques in any discussion is to seek clarification (if allowed to). Don’t argue, don’t be snarky - appear to be open and honest and genuine.

A Transwoman is a Woman

What do you mean by ‘trans’? What do you mean by ‘woman’?

If you do this right (and it’s by no means easy to do this - you have to have the mother birthing person of all poker-faces these days) it can really expose the contradictions and weaknesses in the view you want to challenge.

It’s often met with hostility and frustration. The person challenged in this way will, at some level, realise they’ve been snookered and react in an uppity way. It’s another reason why Matt Walsh’s documentary What Is A Woman? was so powerful - it was a masterclass in this technique of probing with requests for clarification.

The ‘academics’ Walsh interviewed (even if a highly-selected set of responses from a larger, more sane, set) tried their best to emulate his technique. They failed - and with hilarious results. One ‘academic’ asked in a posture of ‘guru-like’ assumed wisdom and condescension

Does a chicken have a gender identity? Does a chicken cry?

No idea. They’re pretty good at crossing roads though (although the reason for them doing so is not often clear).

This clip is only 35s long and says an encyclopaedia’s worth about the state of modern further education.

Given the recent egg shortages and price hikes, it’s obviously important we try to understand much more about chickenhood. The professor asks “does a chicken commit suicide?” - certainly a viable hypothesis for today’s egg crisis. They’re offing themselves in droves. Either that or self-identifying as roosters.

The opening to this clip is very, very instructive. The professor asks

Whose truth are we talking about?

Define ‘truth’ here.

If we’re going to use words like truth - we need to know what they mean. Walsh is talking about an objective, external, truth that can be verified. The academic is talking about some internal ‘truth’ which is really an entirely subjective interpretation of reality and which cannot be verified.

They’re talking past one another - because they’re using different definitions of the word ‘truth’ here.

Seeing fairies at the bottom of your garden might be some internal ‘truth’ for you - but it sure as hell isn’t THE truth.

How do we even communicate properly when the meaning of words has such fluidity? It’s a fluidity that works well in great works of literature, or in religious texts, but it’s not so good for everything else we might need to do in the course of a normal day.

Whilst the pursuit of science can invoke similar emotional reactions to those of art or religion, science is not art. Science, like art, is a creative endeavour. But it’s a very tightly-constrained kind of ‘creation’.

It’s the opposite of what the queer theorists wish to achieve, which is a society free of traditional constraints and boundaries (and maybe even any boundaries at all).

I’ve just watched the movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once - which I thoroughly enjoyed. The title is a pretty apt (although exaggerated) description of how ‘progressives’ seem to approach ‘meaning’ at times. Stuff can mean all sorts of things depending on one’s inner truth, all at the same time, and you can pick whichever ‘meaning’ best suits your specific argument of the moment. They seem to want a world in which our precious ‘inner’ selves are freed from any constraints and encouraged to run amok in an imagined inner utopia of boundless possibility.

But it’s not really constraint free is it? For all their emphasis on ‘inner freedom’ and escaping the oppressive boundaries of the various systemic isms, it’s only ‘freedom’ within a narrow set of ‘allowed’ opinions. You can be as beautiful and wonderful on the inside as you like, provided you stick within the boundaries of the woke catechism.

If you commit heresy against woke - then you become worthless and not beautiful at all.

I don’t see any way out of this woke hellhole we’ve dug for ourselves - at least not in the short term. Too many people have become wedded to an ‘internal’ narrative - which consists of one or more of the great narratives of the day which emphasize (and prioritize) things like internal trauma, or victimhood, as a result of external ‘systemic’ oppressions.

Some degree of ‘inner’ reflection is healthy and, probably, essential. It’s definitely not healthy to abdicate responsibility for your feelings and ascribe all (or even any) of them to external factors. Nobody ‘makes’ you feel anything - you do it to yourself. It is not always possible to control one’s feelings (eg falling in love) but dealing with them is your own responsibility.

These days it is ‘lived’ experience which is dominant and things are ‘true’ because someone says they are. We should be aiming for the primacy of objectively interpreted experience as far as we can.

But objectivity requires clarity. It requires definitional clarity. If we’re allowed to pick and choose the meanings of words to match a given situation then it’s difficult (maybe impossible) to be fully objective⁵.

If we can’t agree on this definitional clarity then we can’t even have a productive conversation.

I would be very suspicious of the motives of anyone who does not seek clarity, or those, like queer theorists, who would eschew the very notion of clarity.

1. For those not familiar with the (old) UK system, the O stands for ‘ordinary’ and would be an exam typically taken at around age 16. The A stands for ‘advanced’ and these were 2-year courses which would be examined typically at age 18.

2. Although sometimes we have to be wary about this. Again at O-level (English Literature) a poem was set as study. The exam question centred around the question of why the poet had mis-spelled a word (the mis-spelling resulted in another legitimate word; eg bough and bow). When the poet became aware of this, he wrote in to a national newspaper and explained : I’m just crap at spelling

3. At least in ‘common’ usage. There were ‘academic’ definitions for some of these things - but not all of these either agreed or made much sense.

4. Having a set of wheels is a necessary condition for the attractiveness of a car. It’s not a sufficient condition; you won’t find all cars with wheels attractive - but you’re not going to buy one from a showroom if it doesn’t have wheels.

5. And I am making a huge assumption here that objectivity is a valuable and desirable goal. I don’t think this would be an acceptable position for many ‘woke’ theorists.